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On Think Tanks was founded in mid 2010. It has evolved from a blog into a global platform dedicated to study and support policy research and policy research centres, or think tanks. The members of the On Think Tanks Team and its Advisory Board are spread out across 6 continents!

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The business model is an essential part of any organisation’s sustainability. It is indeed the heart of any organisation -including think tanks. Ralphs (2011) defines the business model as:

the manner by which the think tank delivers value to stakeholders, entices funders to pay for value, and converts those payments to research with the potential to influence policy.

In general, however, only few think tanks spend sufficient efforts to carefully design, revise or even change their business models. We find, instead, that:

Think tanks might consider that their business models have been around for some time and since nothing serious as happened to threaten their organisations it is not necessary to review them. Yet even if something did take place, they may interpret this as external factors and little attention would be directed to their business models’ performance.

An even more fundamental problem might be that think tanks are reluctant to learn from their counterparts’ business models. They fear of opening a discussion about this subject to avoid sharing their secrets with their competitors.

Thus, from The Exchange initiative we are working on a project that seeks to deepen on these ideas and provide think tanks with knowledge that will allow their leaders to shape their organisations’ business models to better serve their missions, given the contexts in which they operate. The main questions we seek to answer is:

What are the key aspects that characterize effective business models in the context of developing countries?

This comparative study in Indonesia and Latin America is expected to provide findings for think tanks working in other developing countries and to donors supporting them.

Methodology

Through our initial research we found that the literature does not provide a set of established methods. Nevertheless, some efforts have been done by Osterwarder and Pigteur (2010), Yeo (2011), and Ralphs (2011). These works helped us to understand why business models are important, what aspects of the business model should be scrutinised, and what could be the implications of business models failures.

Besides producing six case studies, our research will generate a synthesis report that compares some common and important aspects between the two sets of think tanks: Indonesian and Latin American think tanks.

The goal is to understand the underlying factors that generate such variations, what are the key aspects that characterise effective business models in the context of developing countries, and why certain models might work for certain types of think tanks and in certain contexts or circumstances.